This is a 2023 Story Selling TransFORMe update on making COSLA videos and Marketing Plans for the AGSB Marketing Class of Coach Z, Prof Bong de Ungria of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

To the casual observer, some points may seem trivial. But excellence is a habit that does not overlook controllable mistakes.

Even Steve Jobs started his creative journey with a dissatisfaction over the font and typeface that was available before he challenged the norm. Content is king but form and beauty allows the full value of the crown to be seen by all.

Behind the Macintosh: Jobs’ Passion for Perfect Typography

In his famous 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Steve Jobs spoke about this experience and its impact on his design philosophy. He said: “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

At the time Jobs was learning about typography, most personal computers displayed text using relatively crude bitmap fonts. These fonts lacked the refined aesthetic and variability of professionally typeset text or hand calligraphy. Their limited resolutions resulted in jagged edges, and there was little attention to the finer details of typography, such as kerning (the spacing between characters) or the use of ligatures (special characters that combine two adjacent letters).

When Jobs and Steve Wozniak developed the Apple Macintosh, one of Jobs’ goals was to bring better typography to personal computing. He believed that the computer interface should be not just functional, but also beautiful and engaging. This philosophy led to the inclusion of multiple typefaces and proportional fonts in the Macintosh’s word processing software, MacWrite.

This was a significant departure from the standard, monospaced fonts found on other computers of the era. In essence, Jobs’ dissatisfaction with the current state of digital typography in the early computer era was rooted in his exposure to the richness and artistry of traditional calligraphy and typography. His experiences at Reed College and the lessons he learned there directly influenced the emphasis on design and aesthetics in Apple products.

These are the latest reminders on how to do it in our marketing class…